Hatsune Miku began as singing software and became a virtual pop star
In 2007 a Japanese company released a voice synthesizer and, almost as an afterthought, gave it a face: a turquoise-haired android girl. Fans on a video site began posting songs she sang, and within a few years Hatsune Miku had a racing car livery, her own snow festival character and an estimated ¥10 billion in branded merchandise.
Miku is a voicebank from Crypton Future Media, built on Yamaha's Vocaloid 2 engine and released on August 31, 2007. Her voice was assembled from recordings of the voice actress Saki Fujita, each clip a single Japanese syllable sung at a controlled pitch, which users string together into lyrics. The name blends the Japanese for first, sound and future, and her code name CV01 marks her as the first of Crypton's Character Vocal Series.
The illustrator Kei Garō was given almost no brief: make her an android, and use the turquoise associated with Yamaha synthesizers. Details of her outfit, including the interface on her sleeve, borrow from Yamaha hardware. The product was aimed at professional producers, yet within two weeks Amazon Japan reported sales of 57,500,000 yen, making it the best-selling software there at the time.
Nico Nico Douga, a Japanese video platform, turned the software into a phenomenon as users uploaded songs made with it. A clip of a cartoonish Miku spinning a spring onion to Ievan Polkka became especially popular, and a free fan-built program, MikuMikuDance, let amateurs animate her in 3D. A 2010 add-on gave her six extra voice colours, from Soft to Dark, and by 2017 a Mandarin voicebank had made her the first officially trilingual Vocaloid product.
Commercial spin-offs followed. A BMW Z4 in Miku livery raced in the 2008 and 2009 seasons, and since 2010 a winter variant called Snow Miku has fronted the Sapporo Snow Festival, redesigned every year, sometimes by fan contest. Crypton later moved away from Yamaha's engine for its own Piapro Studio tools, though a Vocaloid 6 version singing in three languages arrived in April 2026.
Source: Hatsune Miku
